Soulframe Pre-Alpha - First Impressions - Look And Feel

 Oh, look! Another post about Soulframe! That makes three out of the last four. Regular readers may recognize a pattern here...

Over the lifetime of this blog, there have been any number of times where I started playing a new game and it immediately became the only thing I seemed to want to write about. Most of those games were either MMORPGs or, in more recent times, single-player RPGs or survival/crafting games.

There are two simple reasons for that and the most significant of the two is probably how very easy it is to come up with things to say about those kinds of games. At the start of any game it's all first impressions but with those genres, it can take weeks to get to grips with the mechanics, the lore and all the weird idiosyncratic choices the developers have made, which makes for plenty of post hooks. 

First impression posts are incredibly easy to write, too, and I've always enjoyed writing them. They're like reviews but with none of the finality. Writing a review can feel like an onerous responsibility, something you feel you have to get right, first time. Recording a First Impression is nowhere near as serious an undertaking: everyone knows anything you say is subject to change as you gain experience and understanding.

The second reason is, if I'm enjoying something, I want to talk about it. Growing up, I always wanted to be a reviewer. I didn't particularly want to be a critic. Critics take the whole thing a bit too seriously. Reviewers seem to have a lot more fun. 

I didn't want to make definitive judgments on things. I just wanted somewhere I could express my opinions on things I liked, only on paper to an audience instead of just to my friends in the pub. That's how I got into the zine scene. 

And it would have been things I liked, for the most part. I do like to tear into things that really annoy me, once in a while, but it's a self-indulgence, something to save for special occasions.

 

If there are multiple posts about a game here, particularly all clumped together with barely anything else between them, it almost certainly means I'm really enjoying whatever it is I'm writing about. 

I am really enjoying Soulframe. I didn't expect to. I downloaded it not out of any great personal desire to play it, not quite on a whim, more with a sense of duty. This is, even now, as much a blog about MMORPGs as it is a blog about anything and Digital Extremes is a relatively significant player in that market. 

They're a Western developer with a commercially successful MMO in operation and there isn't exactly a surfeit of those these days, especially in the AAA bracket. Warframe may not technically qualify as a triple-A game - it doesn't cost $70 for one thing - but it comes close, certainly in terms of quality and continued development, so a second MMO from the same developer ought really to be quite a big deal around here. I could hardly ignore it when they decided to go public with the current build.

I wasn't looking forward to playing it all that much. I was definitely curious but I thought it would be a quick in and out. I'd play just enough to get the feel for it, write a post or two and then, if I didn't hate it, I'd probably keep it on the hard drive to check back in, now and again, if and when I heard there was anything new worth writing about there.  

I didn't expect it would turn into the game I feel like playing when sit down at the PC every day. Okay, it has only been five days but still. A lot of games I write a post about here don't get even to Day Two.

This morning, for example, I could have been playing through the new storyline in Neverness To Everness. It went live late yesterday evening. But I didn't. I did log in to NTE today but only to do my dailies and such. I didn't hang around because I was itching to get back to Soulframe. 

 

The reason for that itch is revealing in itself. I really enjoy Neverness To Everness. I play every day and I'm up to date with the storyline. I'm invested in the game and I have no plans to stop playing it, at least until Ananta arrives in January. 

But as I've said many times, open world gacha games can be more like watching a TV show than playing a video game. I was aware as I made my choice of what to play this morning that if I went with NTE, I'd almost certainly be spending the next couple of hours effectively watching a movie. I'm confident it will be a good movie but quality's not the issue; participation is.

It doesn't help that I'm also playing Nivalis Nights every day, another game I'm really enjoying. I've had to restrain myself from not writing post after post about that one, too. Gameplay there is more active than the story content in NTE bit it's still mostly talking and there's no combat at all. Playing Soulframe has reminded me that sometimes I just like to kill things.

I'm sure there's a lot more to the game than that but so far it's pretty much all I've been doing: running all over the place, partly exploring but also looking for things to kill. People to kill. Firing arrows at anyone who looks at me funny. 

And it's been ridiculously entertaining. As I said in the last First Impressions post, the bow is really satisfying to use. It's easy to aim, it does a lot of damage and my arrows set things on fire! Nothing like a flaming arrow to brighten up the day.

Even though I've had a couple of crashes logging out, which makes me concerned for the strain playing the game might be putting on my machine, I'm still very keen to keep on playing. At this stage it's not even about progression, the hook in all MMORPGs. It's mostly the tactility and the tactics. 

 

Ever since early EverQuest, I've always enjoyed "clearing a camp".  You find a tent or a campfire or a building with three or four hostiles hanging around just minding their own business and you start picking them off, one by one. It's psychotic behavior that shouldn't be encouraged but boy, is it fun! 

It's also been out of fashion in MMORPGs for far too long. Everything there for years seems to have been all about running into the middle of a camp and firing off every AE all at once to kill the whole lot as fast as you can. Or maybe that's just the classes I've been playing...

With the ranger or whatever it's called in Soulframe, I have the pleasure of standing well outside the camp, assessing the risks, seeing who's there and what they might be able to do to me, then taking a long, careful aim and, if I'm lucky, one-shotting whichever lucky sap I've settled on as my first victim. If they survive, a second shot before they know what's happened to them usually does the job.

Sometimes, if I'm really being cautious, I can whittle the guards down one by one but they aren't anywhere near as dumb in this game as in most, so they do tend to both notice and react when the guy standing next to them suddenly bursts into flames and falls over. Unlike other games, though, they don't always boil out of the camp in a mindless frenzy. The archers and mages hang back and even take cover while the heavies put up their big shields and stomp towards me, slowly, flanked by their lighter-armored pals and their armored wardogs. 

The melees dodge and weave, too. There's a lot to think about. It can turn into something between a dance and a game of tag as I try to keep them out of melee range while not getting punctured by arrows or blasted with lightning from the back line. It's not subtle - well, not the way I do it - but it's involving and a lot of fun. Not least because I almost always win!

I'm quite taken with the general look and feel of the game outside of combat. It's just different enough from most of the fantasy MMORPGs I've played to feel fresh, although I'm not making any claims for originality by saying that. It's more that the designers have taken a selection of familiar tropes and put them together in a slightly different order from how I'd expect to see them. It may not be original but it definitely has its own personality.

 

For example, Soulframe has probably the best login sequence I can remember. It's an odd thing to be praising but when it comes to first impressions, you can't make one much earlier than at the login screen. I'll describe how it works.

What you see above is the static screen, where you enter your login details. It isn't entirely static, of course. Like many MMO login screens, there are moving parts to the image but it goes a lot further than that. When you input your name and password and press Login to enter the game... you enter the game. From that screen, just as you see it. There's no discernible transition. You're just... there, somehow.

The platypus rolls over, the fawns stand up (It's not always the same fawns, either.), your character gets to their feet and the screen becomes the world. I still haven't figured out how it's done. 

If you look at the shot above and the one at the top of the screen, you can also see that they're kind of in the same place and kind of not. It's not just the change in the weather, the perspective is different and the foliage, too. I haven't figured that out yet, either, whether it represents the place you were at when you logged out or if its a generic location.

I didn't notice it at first but after a while I started to get the feeling I was in a different place when I logged back in from where I remembered being when I quit. And then one session I logged out in an Inn (The only Inn I've seen to date.), expecting to be there when I came back. But I wasn't. 

I was somewhere on the hillside, outside the village. I noticed that, alright but that Inn is an instance of some kind so that might explain the relocation. Once I'd had it brought to my attention, though, I started to think about how it never seems that I come back exactly where I was. I'm going to have to take screenshots to be sure it's not my imagination but that's how it feels. 

That, though, isn't the really discomfiting part. What makes me feel slightly disoriented every time is the way the login image somehow shifts, pretty much imperceptibly, to become the gameworld itself as my character rouses herself and gets to her feet. It's like a magic trick.

There's no obvious transition, even though what you see in the image isn't necessarily the exact same spot where your character appears. Somehow the whole image coalesces and there you are, in the game, with WASD working and the rain falling and everything changed. I've never experienced anything quite like it in a game before (Or possibly I have and I've forgotten but let's not get into all that again.) 

That's the most unusual of the transitional effects but by no means the only one. There are some actual cut scenes in the game, and very good they are too, but there are odd inserts that appear at the bottom of the screen, with a character's image, a voiceover and some text and there are appearances by ghosts, who just pop up in the world and talk to you, and there are mysterious voices that tell you things without you being able to see who's speaking.

It's a bit of a mess, really. It does feel like at times like the designers are trying out a few different options to see which works best. hey probably are. It is a pre-alpha, after all. I imagine after a while they'll settle on the ones they like best but at the moment I'm enjoying the chaos of it all. And that login trick is really something. They'd better keep that.

The other thing I wanted to talk about under "Look and Feel" is the setting and the lore. Once again, I ought to make it clear I've done next to no research about Soulframe outside the game and, frankly, precious little inside it, either, so I don't know anything other than what I've seen and heard and read as I've explored, talked to NPCs and done their quests. 

With that caveat, the scenario seems to go something like this: a militaristic regime of humans or humanoids, using what looks like steampunk/magitech technology, has invaded and subdued all or part of a landmass that was previously the home of some kind of druidic/shamanistic/animist culture. The invaders may be from another planet. Certainly I saw something that looked very much like a spaceship.

 

You, the player character, seem to be one of the invaders, or you were, once. Minnow has been called a traitor by the invaders, anyway. She's also referred to repeatedly as an "Envoy" by both sides, suggesting she's been sent from one to the other. Then again, all that stuff with grandpa suggests she grew up in the druid culture, so I'm torn on her origins. I imagine it all gets explained in the main storyline, eventually.

The supposedly subjugated population isn't entirely cowed. Minnow has already been recruited by one of their resistance groups and been given a mission against the occupying forces. She's also rescued a number of animals, some of whom have talked to her. There's a lot of rescuing animals to do in this game. The non-talking ones seem very grateful. There are some really lovely moments, when the rabbits and squirrels you can set free from cages in camps pause, before running off, to jump into your arms for a quick cuddle.

The talking animals, which may or may not be spirit beasts, aren't nearly as friendly. The two I've rescued have been pretty pissy about it, in fact. The stag knocked Minnow down and the wolf threatened to kill her. Neither of them seemed inclined to trust her, both referring to her species - human, I assume - as proof of her untrustworthiness, no matter what she might have done to show otherwise.

There's quite a lot of that sort of thing and I like it a lot. I'm a little less keen on the pseudo-Celtic/Norse mythology at the back of it, though. Partly, that's because those two traditions have been done to death in fantasy games over the years. I'd be happy not to hear about any more Norse or Celtic mythology for a couple of decades. 

Mostly, though, it's all those Hibernian accents and especially the dialects. They sound genuine enough. Authenticity isn't the problem. They're just drawing too much of my attention to the way things are said,  pulling it away from what's being said. I haven't switched the voices off yet (If you even can.) but it could come to that.

I recognize, even as I'm saying it, that what I'm finding mildly annoying is almost certainly delighting other players. Ah yes, other players. Now we come to it, don't we? This is an MMORPG, isn't it? So where is everybody?

But, yet again, this post has breached the two-thousand word barrier before I've covered everything I was going to talk about. That's long enough for a blog post (Unless you're Kaylriene, of course. I ran this one through a word counter and it came out at over 11,000 words, which may well be the longest blog post I've ever seen...).

To be continued, then. And it will be. I'm certainly going to be playing more Soulframe, which means I'll just as certainly want to keep on writing about it.